Bloodbath Update

After twenty four hours of bleeding through the bandage on my finger, I called my doctor, who informed me that one could indeed bleed to death out of their finger. It seemed a pretty pathetic way to die, so I took myself to the emergency room, feeling very juvenile..... and since there was really no clump of skin remaining to stitch together, they put on this funny gauze that created a new, rather fake, layer of skin. The way they wrapped my finger made it look like the thing had been severed to near death and I made a ton of money in pity tips. I may resort to similar techniques in the future when times get tight.

Dope Move #42

When painting a set of stairs
and you make yourself a cup of strong tea to keep you going...
and you're painting those stairs from the top to the bottom....
be sure to rest the mug of tea
on the
bottom
of the stairs,
not the top.

Bloodbath~ Take II

• I went to visit my friend Amy yesterday at her cafe in Stowe. She was in the kitchen with all her staff.... picking chicken off the bone for her chicken curry salad, mixing up the dough for scones, and mixing up some kind of dressing in the processor. All at the same time. She showed me her hand at one point. Her one finger looked old and arthritic.... all swollen and black and blue at the knuckle. She broke it the day before. I can't remember how.

• Jared, a regular here at the shop.... like, seven hours a day kind of regular.....the one whose heart may someday explode from the amount of chai he drinks........his finger is all busted up from jamming it between two heavy logs while taking down a big old cedar tree for his landlord.
  

• Old Bob, another regular at the shop....like, three times a day kind of regular.... the one who drinks the half coffee/half hot water and eats prison toast each morning.... he came in this afternoon and showed me his left hand. His thirteen year old grandson, playing around, poked the end of a broom handle at him and when Old Bob grabbed hold of the broom handle his grandson gave it a tug. Turned out the end of the broom handle was riddled with nails and tore up Bob's hand pretty bad.
  

• Holly, my fairly full time employee at the shop (could hardly manage the place without her, really) grew up on a dairy farm.... hence, the work ethic of an ox. They have a herd, still, of about sixty Holstein and her dad is running the place with her three brothers. Last night while trying to hitch a wagon to the back of his tractor, he got his finger caught between the pull and the wagon and lost half of his pinky finger. . He went in today to have the skin sewed up around what bone remains and will have a half of a pinky on his one hand forevermore.
  

• I've been operating this 12" deli slicer for about two and a half months now and always say a little prayer of gratitude every time I finish a round with it and still have all of my own fingers. I don't know if there is some kind of cosmic universal curse on fingers this week or what but........... I have to have the blade rotating to really get the thing clean. It spins. I spray.... bleaching while wiping it down (carefully) with a rag. Today though, in lieu with that cosmic universal curse on fingers, the blade got the better half of the tip of my ring finger. Went in deep and left a fat chunk of skin dangling from the cut... I pulled the skin off since it was just too much to realistically adhere back to the finger at any point and when people suggested I go in for stitches I had to explain that there really wasn't anything to stitch back together... it's just kind of a hole in my finger now. Bled like a mo-fo. Heavy bled like a mo-fo for two and a half hours. Like... bleeding like a mo-fo through heavy gauze and band-aid every few minutes for a solid two and a half hours. I considered closing up shop to avoid bleeding in people's pastries but I was able to duck away into the back room every few minutes to swap out a new bandage. Regular customers and good friends jumped behind the counter to get their own drinks so that I could keep my hand above my head with good pressure right on the cut.

That was at 2pm. It's five minutes to eight now and the band-aid/gauze set up I've had on
now for a few hours is starting to seep through again. I closed up the shop with a big fat yellow glove on that hand... avoiding getting the cut wet. I'm now going to go into the back kitchen and prime the old wooden staircase and beams because I can't put it off any longer and I've been telling myself all day that it was going to get done tonight. So it will. I'll keep the glove on.

But maybe I should dip the glove in Elmers glue first, sprinkle a little glitter onto it so that
I can at least look like Michael Jackson while I do my painting. If anyone still has their old
Thriller coat, or maybe the shiny socks, send them up or drop them off at the shop. I could
start a whole new trend.

Theory of Relativity

Mondays are slammed at the shop. Most of the other places in town are closed for lunch so everyone piles in to my place.

Today, after my morning help left, I was behind the counter taking it in waves.... except the coming up for breath between waves equated to tackling the sink of mounting dishes. During one rush, I looked over my shoulder to a woman that had been standing at the counter for a few minutes in a pretty blue scarf.

"I'll be with you in just a moment," I tell her, looking her in the eye to let her know I'm not ignoring her.

"Oh, that's okay. I'm fine," she answered, a big smile on her face. "I had malaria last week. I'm just fine now. I can wait."

Wow. How's that for a shift in perspective!?

Sandra

I have Fridays off.
I usually end up in the shop anyway, but I have been making an effort to spend less time there on my one day off. This morning, though, I got a call at 7am (as I was dragging Ella from the warm bed, convincing her that it was time to get ready for school). It was Hannah, sick with the flu, having showed up anyway but desperate to go home.

So I worked till 2pm and it was fine. I'm just used to being there at this point. On my days off, I get nervous...it feels foreign to not be there. Alien.

But Ella had plans to hang at a friend's house after school till 7pm and so I had the whole afternoon to do something with.

I have a friend who owns a used bookstore. She's in her early seventies and has spent the past forty some years in this old brick home, raising two children, collecting books and making incredible sculptures out of stone and steel and clay. She's long and willowy, thoughtful and inquisitive and I just pray that when I reach her age, I am equally as captivated with the world and as willing to dive into it's mysteries.

I met her almost five years ago when I was between jobs... having left a heartbreaking job working with kids in state's custody and trying to figure out what would come next. I spent the summer doing work in her garden... weeding, scrubbing out her carved bird baths, building stone steps in her sculpture garden. It was quiet work, especially after three years of working with angry teenage boys. It allowed me several thoughtful hours each day, my hands in the dirt, clearing the weeds that had grown up in my mind. By the end of the summer, though, I was hardly getting any work done at all because I would find myself in her kitchen come lunchtime, drinking tea and eating soup and talking with her until nearly dusk. She had been widowed then for about a year and a half and was deep in the process of healing her grief. Her husband had been a painter and they'd spent their lives sharing their art and "reaching for the same star". She was learning then to be at peace with the quiet and solitude. She read books, took up Tai Chi, starting learning more about dreams and getting lost in long symphonies.

I eventually took the job at the inn at Stowe and would often steal away for the afternoon... landing in her kitchen for more conversation, tea and soup.

Today, when I had that chunk of hours to do with whatever I liked.... I took myself there.

She showed me the new sculpture she's working on... an antler woman.... and she talked about how the shape and image of antlers shows up in so many places... on the branches of trees, the patterns of streams and rivers....

She asked for help covering her little rendition of a hot tub with some plywood for the winter. Two summers ago, she dug up a peice of earth outside her back door.... about the shape of a regular bathtub. She then lined it with a tarp and on summer days she fills it in the morning with fresh water from a garden hose... which gets warmed all day by the sun's heat. In the evening, she crawls into her home-made tub and reads her books... sheltered by the tall evergreens she dug up and planted forty two years ago when they bought the house.

She's amazing. And I feel like the four hours I spent there with her has refueled me. We drank lemon ginger tea and talked about ravens and family and dreams. We talked about how to really keep a toilet clean and Persian poets and old dogs. I could have stayed long into the night, but as usual, had to drag myself away. It was like a fix. Like eating bread after being stranded on a desert island for a really long time.

Familiars

When I was a kid, I’d drive with my dad to the beer distributor to pick up the new half keg of “yellow beer” for the beer miester that lived in our dining room. I liked going because it was one of the few times that I’d get my dad to myself. Sometimes he’d turn up the stereo and blast opera for kicks, sometimes we’d talk.

I never liked the way the place smelled and it was always cold but I got a little Dum Dum lollipop every time so it really was a worthwhile journey. Pina Colada was always my favorite. That or Cream Soda.

Turns out, my friend Dana’s dad owned the place and there’s a pretty strong chance that, nine times out of ten, she was the one handing over the lollipop. We put it all together about eight years ago…one night after our girls fell asleep and we were drinking wine out on the porch. I think it was her first time in Vermont….our first time spending any real time together. She hadn’t spent much time out in the country yet and while we were sitting there on the porch, we heard a fox (or maybe a fisher cat) come and attack one of the chickens in my hen house. It dragged the thing, squawking and gurgling in the dark, around to the front yard and proceeded to knaw it in front of us. We could see nothing except for the predators glowing eyes in the dark and all we could hear was the crunching of bone and swallowing of chicken. We sat there holding hands in my funny little popazon chair, too freaked out to run for the indoors and too fascinated to try. It shocks me still that Dana now lives in the country herself. I was sure she’d be traumatized for life.

She came up on Monday with Amelia, her hilarious nine year old, and our buddy Kopicki to sit at the bar at the shop, drink tea and eat maple oatmeal scones. Like Ella, Amelia just got herself a pair of Heelies too… so she and Els spent the afternoon cruising Johnson’s sidewalks and eating way too much candy with the money they had stashed in their pockets. I’m sure Ella’s teachers would be very happy to know that that’s how she spent her day away from school. Very enriching. Very productive. But it beats the hell out of the all the Christopher Colombus bullshit she’d otherwise have been getting fed.

Having Dana and Kopicki sitting at my bar all day made for an incredible shift behind that counter. It was like a merging of worlds… the old and the new. Dana only offended about 25% of my customers with her crazy lack of filter between brain and mouth and Kopicki left with a fat stash of maple oatmeal scones for his friends in southern Vt.

It took about seventy three hours for the girls to come down from their sugar rush. This is not what I had in mind when I introduced a weekly allowance!

Foliage Season

The economy in Vermont is very much tourism based. Most towns and their small (and not so small businesses) make their bread and butter during peak tourism periods…. foliage being very much one of those periods. There’s usually one weekend, in particular, when the colors of the trees have peaked and the roads are saturated with out of state plates belonging to drivers who really shouldn’t be sightseeing and operating a vehicle at the same time. No one really complains since their wallets feed the economy. This weekend is one of those weekends.

Don’t ask me why the town of Johnson scheduled a planned power outage for today, Saturday, between the hours of crack-of-dawn and noon-time. My absolute bread and butter block of time…it being a coffee shop and all and people, for the most part, really liking their coffee in the morning. When I called the guy in the municipal office to bitch, the poor guy sounded exhausted from dealing with every other business owner in town who had also taken their turn calling him to bitch. I also wanted to find out if they had some kind of stash of funds to compensate business owners for situations like this…. situations when the town makes a dumb ass move and decides to put people out of business during absolute peak business periods. I figured the chances are slim but maybe it’d at least drive the point home. And no, they have no such stash.

I did get to sleep in a few extra hours… which was nice. I got to do some extra prep in the morning and decorate the front of the shop with my new mums and pumpkins and corn stalks.

I was sitting outside, eating a melon and hanging with the boys who do web design upstairs when the digital clock down the street started blinking again. We rushed in, brewed up the coffee and filled the register with the till just in time to get slammed with more cyclists coming through town.

I don’t know what it is about these people. I don’t know if they go to some kind of seminar before heading out onto the Vermont country roads or what, but they seem to have mastered the art of rude. Every week we get a delivery of a great Burlington paper called SevenDays and they get stacked right inside the door - free for the taking. It was pouring down rain by the time those bikers came flooding in, so they decided to take every single newspaper on the rack and use them to sit on. I guess they didn't want to get my chairs wet? They left them there, soaking on the seats, when they left....little blocks of typewritten words having imprinted into the wood from the wet paper. They also draped their filthy, muddy clothes all over my furniture to dry and proceeded to wring out their soaking wet socks and biking gloves right onto my nice wooden floors. Assholes.

What did I say about not complaining because their wallets feed the economy. Sssshhhhhh…….

I x’d out the drawer after they all left and the good news is that their arrival provided me with what I would have otherwise made that morning if we hadn’t had a planned power outage. That’s good. Any way to take their business without their company? Maybe exile them out onto the porch the next time they come? I can lay down some blankets on the lawn out back………… Give them each an umbrella?

Cracked Fingers and Taking Stock

It blows my mind how many people, women especially, get that far off look in their eye when they talk to me about what it must be like to own a coffee shop.... and i know that they're picturing some idyllic, quaint experience that involves the smell of baked goods and brewing tea and music playing on the stereo.

And it is all that.

But I can tell that no one really takes into consideration the sliced fingers from sharp knives and how much they burn when you bleach the cutting boards at the end of the night and how all the little creases in your hands turn black from grinding coffee beans and you look kinda like you've been out in your perennial beds planting crocuses for hours....with dirt all caked on your hands that won't wash out. Or maybe they're not thinking about how you're dreams at night turn from sweet symbolic metaphors of life into repeats of nightly cash out sheets or sudden onslaughts of panic about whether or not you ordered enough of that Sumatran French roast that people just freak out about.

Two nights ago, around 10:30pm, I was talking to a friend on the phone while I was making soup for the shop. She was surprised that I had worked all day and was still putting in time for the shop that late at night and asked if it was like that every day. When I told her that yeah, it kinda is, she was surprised that I wasn't complaining and miserable about how much all of this was consuming me. I don't know if it's that I'm not really seeing the forest through the trees or if it just feels good to be putting myself into something but it made me realize that I don't feel compelled at all, really, to complain about it. I guess that's a pretty good thing.

But still, customers (and people I don't even know) ask me how it's going and if I think it's successful so far and while those are such incredibly vague questions and there's no possible way I can give them the full score of an answer during the time it might take me to draw an espresso shot and steam their milk, I find that (even deep down) I like what I'm doing. Whether or not it's successful, I have no freaking clue. It's still too early in the game to know.

I spent sooo much time looking over the Profit and Loss statements of the previous owner while I was building the business plan I couldn't put to use and just a few days ago I took a look at my very own first P&L for my first full month. Talk about driving it home. It was a little like looking at your newborn and thinking 'did i really make happen?'.